In addition to providing bare-metal access to large amounts of compute FAS Research Computing (FASRC) at Harvard also builds and fully maintains custom virtual machines tailored to faculty and researchers needs including lab websites, portals, databases, project development environments, and more both locally and on public clouds. Recently FASRC converted its internal VM infrastructure from a completely home-made KVM cluster to a more robust and reliable system powered by OpenNebula and Ceph configured with public cloud integration. Over the years as the number of VMs grew our home-made solution started to show signs of wear and tear with respect to scheduling, provisioning, management, inventory, and performance. Our new deployment improves on all of these areas and provides APIs and features that both help us serve clients more efficiently and improve our internal processes for testing new system configurations and dynamically spinning up resources for continous integration and deployment. Our new VM infrastructure deployment is fully automated via puppet and has been used to provision a multi-datacenter, fault-tolerant, VM infrastructure with a multi-tiered back-up system and robust VM and virtual disk monitoring. We will describe our internal system architecture and deployment, challenges we faced, and innovations we made along the way while deploying OpenNebula and Ceph. We will also discuss a new client-facing OpenNebula cloud deployment we’re currently beta testing with select users where users have full control over the creation and configuration of their VMs on FASRC compute resources via the OpenNebula dashboard and APIs.

Team Lead of Software Infrastructure, FAS Research Computing - Harvard University

Justin Riley is the Senior Team Lead of Software Infrastructure at FAS Research Computing at Harvard University. At FASRC Justin helps manage the configuration management systems, continuous integration and deployment systems, and software installations and is responsible for... Read More →